With a week away from my exams, the stress is really starting to impact my life and mood. Regardless, each session in Chinese chat, spending the time to teach my student, has also proven to be a great time to review. Because the Chinese language has over 3000 unique characters and does not have a system like English, I often forget words when correcting my student’s test. This has proven to be a challenged as it is quite embarrassing a grade 11 student does not know a grade 7 student’s work. However, this challenge has forced me to focus on the real basics, words that aren’t taught at grade 11, which overall made me have a solid base, which improve my Chinese level and my confidence in my ability as a whole.

In the start of each session, I often test him on a set of words that he is learning at the moment based on his current unit. These words are taken from his learning document which I look at in advance to plan the lesson and get an understanding on what content will be taught. Here is a screenshot of a typical word list.